My Body Runs on Solar Power
Have you ever done everything you can for your body and still had one thing get out of control?
For the last few years, my feet have been causing me consistent drama. I’m in a wheelchair, so they don’t do anything all day, but they still feel the need to go on strike. The sides of my toes break open, and I get sores that won’t heal without help.
When I first went to the podiatrist, she was sure I had a circulation problem, and she suggested that I see a vascular surgeon. Before I went running off to see a surgeon, I asked if they had a vascular test in the office. They did. They attached leads to my toes and ran it. When it finished, I could tell the nurse was confused, so she ran it again.
A few minutes after the nurse left, the doctor came in. She said she didn’t understand it. The sores pointed to a vascular problem, but I had ninety-eight percent oxygen all the way down to my toes.
I told her I understood just fine. My circulation was fine. The simple answer is that I have cerebral palsy, and it does weird stuff to my body. My feet were doing what they were doing because they were cold.
She trusted me, and she waited until summer to see if I was right. When it warmed up outside, my feet healed. Now she knows the answer to my particular problem is heat.
I love summer. Even at ten in the morning, when it’s eighty degrees outside, I’m cold until I go out there. When it’s around ninety, thirty minutes in the sun warms my feet, and they mostly stay warm the rest of the day without any help.
People think I’m cheap because I don’t run the air conditioner. I don’t need it. I’ve had help who couldn’t believe that. So I run it when somebody complains about it.
Everybody knows somebody with diabetes. You can’t throw a rock these days without hitting somebody who is on Ozempic, either for weight loss or blood sugar control, or both. Most of the time, they can manage it as long as they do what they need to do. It’s like my feet in the summer. I don’t have to worry about them breaking open in July because I can go find the sun.
When it starts to get cold outside, the heated socks go on as soon as I get out of bed. I also swap shorts for pajama pants, which are much warmer but only work at home. Shorts and a T-shirt go anywhere, so I never have to change. In pajama pants, if I’m going somewhere, I have to change into nicer clothes first.
Like somebody with diabetes, I can do everything I normally do and still get sores. The only way to handle them is Medihoney or some variant of it. In most cases, that just keeps things where they are, and I do the best I can until late May.
I started paying more attention to my body a few years ago because I knew that eventually it was going to be hard to live with. Most of the day-to-day problems that come with this body have had a fix I could reach. Constipation is one, at least for everyone I’ve met in a chair, and mine was solved by drinking water. So were my congestion and a few other things.
The feet are the first problem I can only manage. Fixing them would take a major step.
Right now I feel good. That isn’t guaranteed to continue, and if I take my feet as an indicator, it probably won’t. That’s scary, because I think I’m doing everything I can possibly do, and I still have this thing that gets out of control when it gets cold.
Age comes for everybody. Most older people around me aren’t shy about the fact that getting old ain’t for sissies. At some point, something pops up that you can only manage.
I will deal with this for the rest of my life. The only answer I can come up with is moving to a tropical climate. Anybody got a house in Hawaii?